A Nation in Peril

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By David Mark Greaves
Donald Trump, always projecting who he is onto others, has used “deranged” several times to describe anyone who opposes him. Now he has gone and cemented his standing as chief among the deranged with his Saturday speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, where he said if he wins back the White House in 2024 he would “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”

Whenever I’ve heard the word “vermin” being used to describe people, it’s always been from the mouths of the most despicable people. We have to go about our daily lives knowing a tyrant is threatening to upend everything we thought we knew about America.
The recent NYTimes/Siena Poll showed that Trump leads Joe Biden in five of six key battleground states. This man could be president. And he won’t be alone with his derangement this time.
The authoritarian government-in-waiting has put together an action plan of vetting loyalists to fill the roles of a gutted civil service and weaponizing all branches of government to go after those who have opposed him in the past. They are planning concentration camps, which for now are for immigrants, and using all levers of power to effect a complete takeover of the country.
This is a surreal moment in American history, a place where we had never thought we’d be. Instead of a Promised Land in our future, we see the possibility of a desolate landscape of hate, hardship, and authoritarian rule.
How did we get here? In the soul of the nation, we never left. From the genocide of the Indigenous people and the 400 years of enslavement of Africans to the lynchings and terror after the Civil War, there has been a White nationalist evil lurking, waiting to express itself. And in Trump, they’ve found their champion to coalesce around and even worship as their savior. And we’ve seen in the past what they’ve done to those not like themselves.
Speaking of threats to the nation, Trump did speak one truth at his rally. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”
We here in blue New York can only send money to candidates and watch with frustration as our concept of who we are as a nation could be decided by well less than 100,000 votes across four swing states.